[In the following essay, Verduyn analyzes Engel's early and unpublished writings to explore her devotion to her writing, the evolution of her themes throughout her career, and the degree to which she realized the objectives she set out in her notebooks.]

Gap between exp[erience] & expression is what writer is aware of.

Marian Engel, notebook entry¹

So you have to scratch around, and it's the scratching around that gives you the experience that later makes for content.

Marian Engel, in an interview²

As demonstrated in her notebooks, or cahiers, Marian Engel had an urgent drive to be a writer and began writing at an early age—with both publishable and unpublishable results. Before the appearance of her first published novel, Sarah Bastard's Notebook, she produced a wealth of writing. Over and above the fiction entries in her cahiers, she wrote a host of stories, poems, plays, and prose pieces, as well as four novels. This constitutes a substantial and interesting body of work, which deserves consideration within a fuller examination of Engel's writing. This chapter considers Engel's youthful publications and early unpublished work.³ Selected examples of, and themes in, this body of material illustrate three points. First, the early and unpublished writings confirm the degree of Engel's devotion to writing. Hers was a feverish commitment, a passion that led to non-stop production, even as these efforts were rejected by publishers and readers. Second, this material assists in tracing the evolution of Engel's writing. The author's early texts and unpublished work offer glimpses of themes and subjects that appear in the cahiers and are more substantially articulated in later published works. Many of these themes reflect the young writer's early struggles in coming to grips with her identity and upbringing. Third, examining this material reveals how Engel's early writing attempted to realize strategies and objectives that she had set out in her notebooks.

In broad terms, Marian Engel's early writings and unpublished texts were exploratory and experimental efforts, which released her incredible drive to write beyond the internal world of the notebooks. A necessary outlet for her insistent imagination, they foreshadowed a serious lifelong devotion to literature and a persistent tendency to experiment with literary form. While this writing was psychologically vital, it was by no means completely successful. It did not fully satisfy Engel's evolving sense of the need to ground artistic imagination and expression in concrete female experience. Generally speaking, the more successful and satisfying of Engel's youthful work and unpublished efforts began to pull together the expression of imagination with the representation of female experience. The young author's writing evolved in fits and starts towards this synthesis, a formula that was at last successfully produced in Sarah Bastard's Notebook.

EARLY ARTICLES AND STORIES

Marian Engel's first published work appeared in the pages of the United Church Sunday School paper, the Canadian Girl. In many ways, this was an ironic starting point, given that Engel's work would, to a considerable extent, be an expiation of United Church Sunday School values and attitudes. In wry recollection, Engel noted that her very first publication was an essay on “the evils of drink.”⁴ The future novelist was the self-described star of the “Canadian Girls' Own Page,” which held monthly writing contests. Between 1947 and 1952—Engel's teenage years—over forty pieces signed Marian Passmore, M. P., or M. R. P. appeared. They included poetry and articles on an eclectic array of themes. Branching out as she neared the end of her teens, Engel entered the annual fiction contest sponsored by the popular magazine for young women, Seventeen. Her short story won third prize and was published in the July 1953 issue.⁵ The story is fairly traditional, but certain features foreshadow Engel's future course towards unconventional and feminist forms of writing, and it is an interesting example of one of the more important insights of the initial stages of her writing: women's dependent position in society.

The story's title is “Al,” a nickname for the protagonist Alison. This itself was suggestive of uncertainties surrounding social identity and expectations, sexual and otherwise. In typical 1950s Ontario middle-class fashion, Al is spending her summer vacation at a cottage in the woods. She is pining over her distant boyfriend, John. Life is waiting for September. The predictability of the scenario is undermined by the unexpected appearance of an older woman, Isabel. Friendship flourishes between the women, but, more importantly, Isabel gives Al access to an unknown and liberating world. Married to an artist, Isabel introduces Al to the previously foreign world of art. The experience transforms the young woman, who becomes more independent of her boyfriend and approaches September in a different, less dependent frame of mind.

This is a plot Engel developed more than once during her early years of writing. Stories she published in university student papers and literary magazines tell similar tales of young women whose lives revolve around male love interests until the world of art is discovered and embraced. New passions and potential appear as the protagonists assume their independence vis-à-vis the conventional options for women. As seen in the cahiers, these involve marriage and motherhood. The world of art materializes against this background. In the early pieces, Engel considered the artistic potential of painting⁶ and music, as well as writing.

In the story “Crow Moon” (published in 1955 in the McMaster University student newspaper, the Silhouette) twenty-year-old Laura MacFarlane is a university student and an aspiring artist with a penchant for painting signs. It is spring, and in Laura's residence, young women are dreaming of summer romance while struggling to study for end-of-term examinations. “For all of them, spring was a bridge … to graduation, to adventures, to marriage,” Engel wrote. “For all, with perhaps the exception of Laura MacFarlane.” Laura's latest sign painting seems to be pointing her in a new direction. “Is this Spring Necessary?” the sign asks. The answer is yes, for this is the spring when Laura will depart from the predictable female path towards marriage and motherhood. New avenues in life open before her. The following excerpt illustrates the turning point. Removing the traditional signs of femininity—her boyfriend David's pin and her make-up—Laura confronts herself in the mirror:

Walk into the washroom; glare at the row of gleaming basins; wince at the leering mirrors; wipe off your lipstick with a piece of paper towel; rinse the glass twice before you drink—they put shampoo in that glass; drink cold water, drink a lot of cold water until you are cool inside; look at yourself in the mirror, faded face, too-bright eyes. This is a new spring. Cry for a new something you know. “Love's sad satiety.”

The passage previews Engel's subsequent stylistic experimentation and strength. Moreover, the mirror and visual imagery evoke not only the theme of re/vision but also the motif of the double, which recurs throughout her work. Laura's “too-bright eyes” see the world in a different way, glimpsing possibilities for her “self” as a painter and for a life beyond the expectation of marriage.

Deviating from the norm seemed more possible outside the family circle. After graduating from Sarnia Collegiate Institute and Technical School in 1952, Engel entered McMaster University, where she completed a B.A. in French and German.⁷ The university setting offered the aspiring author a whole new set of publishing opportunities. Engel worked in various editorial capacities on the two major student publications, the Silhouette and the Muse,⁸ and signed numerous editorials, commentaries, and articles, as well as poetry and prose pieces of her own. Many of these are primarily exercises in genre.⁹ Others are strikingly suggestive of concerns to be expressed in quite different forms later on, as the short poem “any april” illustrates.¹⁰ Read in conjunction with the story “Crow Moon,” it evokes the concept of re/vision in the Adrienne Rich sense of a feminist view that sees the world differently. This requires closing one's eyes to a male vision:

“ANY APRIL”

Blind eyes
Closed over grey philosophy
Veiled with cascading hair
Dreaming cool blue visions
Of Summer-to-come
And Plato-be-damned
Plato-be-damned
And tiredness; blurred visions,
Swimming fossils between the lines.
They count for more than do the words.
I cannot see! I cannot see!

The poem hints at Marian Engel's subsequent interest in revision through writing and re/presenting women's reality. Other poems from the period announce equally important themes that Engel developed in later work—most notably the push and pull between the concrete world of everyday reality and the universe of the imagination. In “Après le Ballet,”¹¹ a young woman walks home alone “not expecting life to be prose.” Her hopes for a more poetic life are dashed by family realities:

Over and around I stumbled:
There were Buicks and fallen branches
And casual signs of autumn and sophistication.
I groped my way
          under the gnat-filled porch globe,
Opened the door, and whispered, “I am home.”
World, stand still! I cannot bear to hear
Old uncle's snore, old auntie's empty cry:
“Was Mrs. Anybody there?”

An untitled poem beginning “I think the soul is greater than the sky”¹² is a sensual depiction of a young woman torn between earth and sky, body and soul. A majority of Engel's youthful efforts deal with the theme of identity formation and the struggles of the budding female artist, a notable case being “Mouse: A Sad Story.”

There are two versions of this story: an early draft among Engel's unpublished papers,¹³ and a version published in McMaster's Silhouette of 20 November 1953.¹⁴ Both present a character developed in Engel's early writing. Mouse, as her name suggests, is a timid young woman lacking self-confidence. One of Engel's “small” people—as conceptualized in the author's cahiers—she is daunted by the “bigger,” more confident individuals around her. Many of these are artists, or people who are artistically talented. In the early version of the story, Mouse belongs to a family of artists, her father being a painter in Paris, her mother a musician trained in Italy. “Everyone in our family, it seemed, had been, or was an artist. I didn't know … I didn't belong to anything really … having almost no family at all.” In her uncertainty and insecurity, Mouse's one wish is to “make me like them … give me their art—help me to create as they do. It's such a lonely world when you are apart from the rest of the family … the proverbial hop out of kin … Oh God, I said, make me like the others—make me an artist too.” When her friend Milo confronts Mouse about her desire to be an artist, she replies “in a small voice” that she would like to be an artist, noting that she draws good lions. “That doesn't make you an artist,” Milo responds. “You've got intuition, Mouse … but intuition is too good to waste on being an artist. You can feel, Mouse, where the rest of us only see. But don't waste your tears on wanting to be an artist, because you don't really want to, you know. It's just part of your loneliness. What you really want is to be like the rest of us.”¹⁵ This rendition of the Mouse story hints at the complicated link between the desire to be an artist and the need to belong and be loved, which is found in Engel's later work. The family assumes a central role, and the future author is already weaving connections between these various elements and art.

In the subsequent, published version of “Mouse: A Sad Story,” the protagonist would like to be a writer, but timidity and 1950s social conventions combine to redirect her artistic ambitions into secretarial services. Jane is a university student in love with a co-worker on the school newspaper. While Max hones his writing skills, Mouse pours her energy into typing his essays: “He knew why I did it, and I knew that he knew why, but I kept right on typing his essays … I would feel mousy again, and type for him, or write copy for him. I used up all my one o'clock leaves for him, too. Once a month he used to kiss me, just to keep me on. I knew that, too, but I kept on.” Eventually Max graduates while Mouse leaves university to marry John, displaying the same lucidity that characterized her romantic feelings for Max: “[John] called me Jane, not Mouse. I was happy because I had the upper hand.” A year into domesticity, however, a copy of Max's first novel, Façade, arrives in the mail. Jane drops everything to read it, until John takes it away. Façade alters the balance in the marriage; John assumes the upper hand and starts to call his wife Mouse.

Mouse's is “a sad story” because it is a tale of women who are interested in becoming artists but who are undermined by lack of self-confidence, by traditional social circumstances that usurp their authority, and by men who belittle their aspirations. Engel had a precocious sense of woman's social status, her dependency, and the extent to which her identity was shaped by others. She was alert and highly predisposed to the liberating possibilities of art and writing—a strategy for life with which to buck contemporary mores and stereotypes. Already, in its early stages, Engel's writing privileged the world of art. It posed the question of women's relationship to this world and explored the issue by looking at the lives of women artists.

From a very early stage, Engel identified with the figure of the female artist. Emily Brontë is the subject of an early submission to the Canadian Girl: “Partners in Silence” (1950).¹⁶ The piece articulates, albeit in a halting way, Engel's sense that to be a writer and a woman meant deviating from traditional feminine norms. “Her portraits show that she [Emily Brontë] was not beautiful,” the young Engel wrote, “but she possessed far more than mere physical beauty.” Affinity between the two writers extends from the question of physical beauty, through the shared experience of writing, to the silence surrounding that experience for women. “We are partners in silence,” the adolescent author wrote, “Emily Brontë and I, on a spring day in the open.” The story's title remained in Engel's repertoire. “Silent Partners” was one of several titles considered for The Honeyman Festival.¹⁷

Engel pursued the theme of the woman writer in her academic work. Proceeding from McMaster University to graduate school at McGill University, she completed a master's degree in 1957 with a thesis, directed by Hugh MacLennan, on the English-Canadian novel (1957). A highly competent, confident, and pioneering analysis in a field only just beginning to be established as an area of graduate research, Engel's M.A. thesis was among the first to examine critically the work of Canadian writers such as Morley Callaghan, Sinclair Ross, Mordecai Richler, Ethel Wilson, and Hugh MacLennan himself. The latter was full of praise for his student's effort, which he described as “the best piece of critical writing I have ever seen in the field of Canadian writing. This final draft is smooth and strong and absolutely sure of itself, with good reason.”¹⁸

Engel's thesis was further groundbreaking for the attention it brought to Canadian women's writing, including that of Quebec authors. As early as 1957, she had observed that “the woman writer … suffers from a paucity of models on the artistic side of her craft.”¹⁹ “As Virginia Woolf emphasizes in A Room of One's Own,” she wrote, “the tradition of women's writing is not a long one and there are only a few great models—the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen and George Eliot” (thesis, 107). Circumventing the “great women” approach to literary history, Engel considered the work of a significant number of Canadian women writers: Constance Beresford-Howe, Joyce Marshall, Ethel Wilson, Gwethalyn Graham, Grace Campbell, Jan Hilliard, Winnifred Bambrick, Jean Beattie, Kathleen Coburn, Christine van der Mark, and Gabrielle Roy. To Engel's regret, many did not continue to write after publishing a first novel. But the future author perceived these women writers' task as a difficult one. Their novels, Engel wrote, reflect one important aspect of women's writing: “the subordination of a whole social world to a love affair, a romantic disproportion which is often the key to success in the world of ‘best-sellers,’ but is still rather frightening in literature” (115). For a woman to publish other than sentimental fiction required courage. Engel detected this courage among and in the work of the Canadians she considered in her thesis. “These women have rejected tedious domesticity on the one hand, and deliberate Britishness on the other,” she wrote. “Since married women are among the few writers to-day likely to have ‘five hundred pounds and a room of one's own,’ an increasing number of them are able to write” (120). Engel later claimed that her graduate research, which director Hugh MacLennan commended so effusively, was merely an excuse for “surveying the territory to find a place for myself.”²⁰ She continued to write fiction throughout her graduate studies.

EARLY PLAYS

The attraction to the artist's life was the major theme of two early plays dating from Engel's Montreal years (1955-57, while doing her M.A. at McGill, and 1958-60, when she taught geography at The Study, a private girls' school in the city's Westmount neighbourhood). MacLennan had encouraged Engel to work on plays, which she did for about four years. This resulted in two unpublished and incomplete texts: “The Deception of the Thrush” and “Beat Up the Rain.” Engel recalled these efforts as “imitation[s] of Look Back in Anger.”²¹ Like poetry, plays were not to be the author's literary venue, but the early practice did hone her talent for dialogue and reinforce an oral dimension that is characteristic of much of her work.²²

“THE DECEPTION OF THE THRUSH”

“The Deception of the Thrush” deals explicitly with a young woman's desire to be an artist.²³ Joan is “a harum-scarum art student with black trousers.” She is romantically linked to Torrance Dean, “O. B. E. and several other things,” whose upper-class background contrasts with Joan's lower social status. Their relationship seems unlikely to endure, as Joan senses during a visit from Torrance when she is bedridden with flu. “Look, Torrance,” she says, “don't pretend to be so horrified. You launched me here, got me a job, and then said I was on my own. I had no intention of cadging on you. It's bad enough to be the orphan-child but I will not cast myself on the doorstep as a sick child.” The play stages the “orphan theme” glimpsed earlier in the cahiers. The female artist clearly is involved in a problematic struggle with love and independence:

JOAN:
It's not freedom I need. I need love and support and encouragement, and how's a woman like me to get it? … Do you know why I hate you [Torrance]? I hate you with all my heart and soul the way I love you: you made me Torrance Dean as sure as God made other people. I don't say my prayers any more you know that? Because the last time I did I caught myself praying to you.

At whatever cost, Joan is determined to be an artist. Reflecting on what this means, she tells her friend Maggie that it is a “gut-raking experience”:

Do you know what that means Maggie, gut-raking? Or would you know? It's living with your insides growling all day and all night; the bloody pelican feeding its greedy ungrateful rotten offspring out of her own belly. It's cannibalism, that's what it is. Sometimes I hate it.

You get this tremendous feeling of force and compression—it goes on and on; then gradually it reaches a peak—and you know it's going to leave you soon.

Despite the intensity of her artistic experience, Joan harbours doubts about her status as an artist:

JOAN:
So what if I'm just a ruddy draughtsman? So what if I'm probably third rate and sentimental and crude and foul about composition. I'm working. Do you know what that means? It means I'm not an amateur any more, not a piffling arty little bitch from St. John's. I'm—not an artist—but I'm damn well almost there and I don't bloody well care who knows it.
MARGARET:
Really, your language when you're in these moods—
JOAN:
The English language is utterly limited when it comes to words that mean what I feel … But I'm somebody, Maggie. I'm somebody.

Female artists' self-doubt and difficult independence, the limits of language, and the importance of feelings in the creative process were all substantial themes of Engel's later, published work. The early, unpublished work also sketched the figure of the mother, who in this play is a painter and a key figure. Joan recalls: “I remember seeing mother—who didn't work as intensely as I do, who couldn't—moaning and groaning this way. And she never even put her own feelings into her pictures. That's why all her stuff is such an emotional desert … oh, I'm not being disloyal, she knew it.” For the young Engel, feelings and the sense of belonging were intertwined with a complex relationship to family and art. Her early work demonstrated an ambivalence and uncertainty that was to characterize the later work as well.

“BEAT UP THE RAIN”

A second early play, “Beat Up the Rain,”²⁴ presents another struggling artist as protagonist. Kate Baldwin is a journalist aspiring to be a writer. She, too, is in a romantic quandry. Jack, a childhood love, is sharing her flat, while her journalist colleague Fidelis—who is really the wealthy Richard Blythe—is in love with her. As the plays begins, in a scene echoing “The Deception of the Thrush,” Kate is bedridden with flu when Fidelis comes to visit. Kate picks this moment to tell him: “Ritchie, I'm a romantic. I believe in plots like this … And I'm just fool enough to hope it could happen. But the wretched truth is, Ritchie Blythe, that the whole thing's a set-up. Jack's hell to live with and I've just ruined any finer feelings you might have towards me by yelling about it. I should sit down and cry.”

Engel detected and depicted a trade-off between love and art. In the story “Crow Moon,” Laura MacFarlane's “necessary spring” had brought two (un)blinding insights: first, she would be a painter; second, this would involve hardship and heartache. “Cry for a love that is too much and not enough; for a tenderness too great and not great enough; a desire too full and not full enough. Cry for a spring too necessary.” Love and art were presented in competition—a competition considerably complicated by the fact of being female. The desire to write was great, but such “rebellion” or liberation was not without consequences. Indeed, it involved a considerable degree of suffering, sacrifice, and loneliness.

Marian Engel's early writings demonstrate that while she wanted to be a writer, she was aware of the consequences and difficulties involved in becoming one. The doubts and uncertainties associated with this life-decision exposed the author's “orphan” need to be loved and to re-create a family setting. The family—the traditional site of loving and being loved, and of a predictable sense of security and identity—established itself early as a key theme for Engel. The notebooks demonstrate her ambivalent attitude towards family. While she appreciated its nurturing features, she rebelled against its constraints. These themes, and their relationship to the world of art, are most intensely articulated in relation to the figure of the mother and the related motif of the house.

To paraphrase the protagonist of Monodromos, in Engel's writing housing is comparable to interior geography. An early unpublished prose piece²⁵ presents the motif of the house and the kindred themes of family and love, children and parents. The text begins, “This was the scene Elizabeth always thought of”:

Always there were the two houses, boxed oblongs at the end of the cul-de-sac and a woman, carrying a child out of the taxi and setting out without hesitation, up the right hand path. Always the right hand path, always the smaller of the two houses, the one with the light upstairs … The lefthand house was, in this picture, full of light, for this was Christmas. A light house, a dark house, both lovely houses, and a woman carrying a child with resolute step up the path to the righthand house … I came home in winter, near Christmas, came home in my mother's arms and was given away—given away like a toy which is the best thing to happen yet—to the right hand house. And not the left hand house. The logical house, my mother's home … And I came again, and again, to this house with its light upstairs, a house of children with no mother, a man without a wife, love without the legitimate, the approved relationships and love unrestrained by blood or fatherhood.

Houses are deeply emotional sites in Engel's writing. Abandoned or motherless children find themselves, like toys at Christmas, in small or big boxes. Musing on the prevalence of the house motif and the concern for place in her writing, Engel suggested that it was perhaps because she was looking for her home and did not find one.²⁶ Her fictional characters are often strongly attached to houses, or at least deeply interested in them. This is true of Minn Burge in The Honeyman Festival as well as Audrey Moore in Monodromos. Bear's fabulous octagonal house plays a key symbolic role in the novel. In both The Glassy Sea and Lunatic Villas, Engel explores variations on the traditional single-family house: the convent and inner-city row housing. Shortly before her death, she compared writing to housing. Words were soldier ants marching across paper with a mission: “They have to build a house.” She continued: “It is up to the writer to decide what kind of house, and what design will prevail. My usual choice is to emphasize the elements, the details, and let the reader decide on the wholeness of the structure.”²⁷

This lifelong interest in and passion for housing appeared early in Engel's writing, and it is one of several instances of how her youthful efforts offer intriguing insights into the origins of many of her artistic and life objectives. Engel's adolescent stories about girls and women, art, and family suggest strongly that her sense of female self was a powerful source of artistic expression. In a seventy-eight page typescript, which appears to be an attempt at a novel, Engel wrote: “I am an egotist, a talker about myself; I enjoy poring over my own life, my own character, begging for facts about myself, about the people around me. My excuse is that this way I learn.”²⁸ This is an early manifestation of Engel's sense that a woman's identity, or female self, constitutes a substantial and sufficient subject and source of art. As in later years, Engel drew on female self—herself—for her art of writing. Indeed, it was when she began to tap seriously into the vein of female subjectivity that her experience with literary art best succeeded. This was the lesson derived from four unpublished novels.

THE UNPUBLISHED NOVELS

As seen in her cahiers, Marian Engel was determined to be a novelist. She felt that novels, more than poetry or plays, offered her a grander tableau to explore and express the themes that attracted her. Ironically, her first, and unpublished, novels did exactly the opposite. While she certainly wrote (and rewrote) a great deal—and with apparent equanimity in the face of early rejections—her first novels were self-confessed failures. Their “failure” was precisely because they did not engage women's experience in the ways Engel wanted so clearly to explore in her artistic expression.

“THE PINK SPHINX”

Engel's first unpublished novel was a quintessential example. “The Pink Sphinx” was “an academic spoof,”²⁹ full of colourful characters, energetic plot development, and witty observation. Hidden identities, telepathic mind reading, murder plots, and people taking wrong trains are all part of this effort,³⁰ which Engel wrote in collaboration with a colleague during a one-year teaching stint at the University of Montana in 1957-58. After gaining her master's degree, Engel might well have proceeded to a doctorate and become, like her fictional character Sarah Bastard, “a lady Ph.D. … one of an increasing multitude, but in [her] own time and space, a rare enough bird” (SB, 8). MacLennan thought Engel's master's thesis had all the makings of a doctoral dissertation,³¹ but she decided not to pursue formal studies, her commitment to writing fiction taking early priority over other possibilities. With a living to be earned, Engel accepted a position as a lecturer in the English department at the University of Montana. There, she met another new young faculty member, Leslie Armour, who became a one-time collaborator and a lifelong friend. Engel recalled:

Leslie was just beginning his career—he had done his PhD in England and was teaching philosophy … I was moaning about not being able to write a novel. So he said, “I'll give you the plot and you write the text.” I wrote ten pages a day for about six weeks and we did the book straight off and sent it off to Diarmuid Russell in New York who wrote back saying, “This is a dreadful novel but it's very well written so I'll keep whichever one of you wrote it.” So that was a start.³²

While it failed to meet any publisher's approval, “The Pink Sphinx” performed a number of important functions in Engel's evolution as a writer. It boosted her confidence in her ability to write a long text, and it earned her praise for the quality of her writing. Leslie Armour recalled how, at the time, Engel felt she could not write as well as her mentor, Hugh MacLennan. “She couldn't write that measured almost leaden prose,” he remarked. “There was a sense of wanting to write about the big issues [like MacLennan] but not being ready to.”³³ Armour provided a solution of sorts by supplying his colleague with a plot fully intended to be light-hearted (“That way there could be no imitating MacLennan,” Armour pointed out.) But the substance was essentially meaningless for Engel. Academic acrobatics and intrigue were not the material she wanted to explore. She carried out her part of the project with a flourish and attracted the notice of publishers into the bargain, but that was the end of it. “The Pink Sphinx” was stored away in a box,³⁴ and Engel proceeded towards her second unpublished novel, “Women Travelling Alone.”

“WOMEN TRAVELLING ALONE”

Engel worked on “Women Travelling Alone” while living in England in 1961-62.³⁵ A Rotary Foundation Fellowship had enabled her to travel to Europe for a year's study at the Université d'Aix-Marseille in Aix-en-Provence in 1960-61. At the end of the year, rather than return to Canada, Engel found work in London, England, translating foreign credit reports. During this time, she began “Women Travelling Alone.”

As the title suggests, the work is about women who, like the protagonist Sheila Reilly, “exist in stages as travellers, fellow-travellers, poets, earth worshippers, teachers, comedians, bitter laborers.” Engel's focus was shifting. She had moved away from the male-dominated world of academe towards a world in which women were the subject. Her aim was to produce a manuscript that was “tight and frugal and as intersected with influences as lives are.”³⁶ But by her own admission, the result was a “big scrappy novel with time and everything out of perspective.”³⁷ It “didn't hang together or know enough of time and space,” despite “some lovely pieces of writing.”³⁸

Part of the problem lay with the protagonist. Sheila Reilly was not the type of female character who would successfully animate Engel's subsequent works. Although she was a “travelling woman,” with insights not available to women stationed at household posts, Sheila “becomes not what she longs to become but something [else].” She “forgot her formlessness and married a painter, Jacques Claude. She was married thus to her own aspirations, and when reality set in she left Claude because he was whole and she was not.”³⁹ Howard Engel, whom Marian married in London on 27 January 1962, described the work as a “fugue of people.”⁴⁰ Engel herself compared it to Woolf's The Years in a letter to her agent, Diarmuid Russell, dated 10 April 1962: “It deals with a woman happily married to a painter who leaves, teaches, travels and tutors in order to find her feet. Facets of lives, portraits of people she likes, despises or lives with, insights at crises, insights forgotten … I want to make the narrative strong, tie it down with a pattern.”⁴¹

Russell wrote back on 8 May 1963: “Women Travelling Alone” is very nicely written but the interest seems to me too evenly spread among the characters and I think readers like this to have a foreground and a background like pictures and I feel a little uneasy as to whether it's a good device to open the book where you do.”⁴² Engel replied: “As for the foreshortened perspective on character, you might mutter that these expatriates are much influenced by the nouvelle vague. Marguerite Duras, etc. and the development of decoration for its own sake. I hear from my non-resident critic that it needs ‘selective detail’; in other words, another bash at it wouldn't hurt, and in the summer I'll have to have something to do to fight the heat.”⁴³

A revised manuscript once again earned Engel praise for her writing abilities. But publishers indicated that the novel did not “seem important.”⁴⁴ “You can figure out this as well as I can,” Russell commented, on returning the manuscript. “They would all like to see your next work.”⁴⁵ On receiving the rejected “Women Travelling Alone,” Engel reread the text and her agent's comments, then jotted the following notation in her cahier: “On the 10th [March 1964], letter from Diarmuid returning Women Travelling Alone Comment “Somehow it does not come together” True!⁴⁶

“DEATH COMES FOR THE YAYA”

Despite the second setback, Engel tried again. The next work she completed was a detective novel entitled “Death Comes for the Yaya,” which was written while she was living in Cyprus. The Engels moved to Cyprus in late 1962. Howard freelanced for the CBC, and Marian taught at St John's (RAF) School in Nicosia while working on her new novel. Once again, in Diarmuid Russell's view, the work did not quite come together.⁴⁷ “What seems to me to have happened,” he explained, “is some sort of uncertainty in your own mind, that you started out to write a mystery and then became interested in the people and giving some picture of a set of characters in Cyprus and then somehow started to feel you were rather letting the mystery go and as a consequence rather let the characters remain undeveloped. In short, I would say you have fallen between two stools.”⁴⁸

Russell's choice of words was appropriate. Engel had indeed fallen between two stools. Detective novels were no more her venue than academic intrigues. “Why was I writing a thriller?” She complained in a notebook after a dispirited reread of “Death Comes for the Yaya.”⁴⁹ As in the case of “The Pink Sphinx,” the work had fulfilled a function for Engel, but it did not articulate her own writer's voice. Another notebook records her reaction on rereading “Death Comes for the Yaya,” in an entry dated 13 March 1965: “Something in me has been released. The writing was, though often frivolous and slangy, looser, freer: still with condensed images.”⁵⁰ Although she came to refer to “Death Comes for the Yaya” as a “terrible detective novel,” this effort played a role in Engel's evolution as a writer. In addition to eliciting yet more praise for her writing capabilities, it provided a foundation for future efforts. The work was later incorporated into her “Cyprus novel,” Monodromos, in which she recast the material outside the generic rules of the detective formula and within her own perspective.

In the meantime, Engel took several steps towards what eventually would become Sarah Bastard's Notebook and Monodromos. Writing from England on 17 September 1964, she informed Diarmuid Russell: “I am working on two novels: one bosh about how deeply one can hate Toronto, another possibly quite good, remittance people on an island. This last will be quickly written, and sent to you before next year, I hope.”⁵¹ Ironically, the latter work, Monodromos, was the novel Engel wrote the least quickly and rewrote the most often. As for the former work, Sarah Bastard's Notebook, it came together to form her first published novel in 1968. But first there was yet one more unpublished novel—“Lost Heir and Happy Families.”

“LOST HEIR AND HAPPY FAMILIES”

Written during 1964-65, when the Engels had returned to Canada and settled in Toronto, “Lost Heir and Happy Families” underwent a long genesis.⁵² Characters such as Stanley the professor and his children (notably John, Christabel's husband in The Glassy Sea) appear both earlier and later in notebooks and published work. In a notebook entry dated 20 March 1969, the author commented on this novel as an exploration of Canadian social history, an area that interested her enormously and to which she would return in the novel she was working on at the time of her death, “Elizabeth and the Golden City”:

level of language is bad—too many prepositional suffixes: e.g. ended-up
all the Ndp & economics references bad because oversimplified & stupid.
Think more deeply or leave out
Importance of good, cold gray ability must emerge from the text. Then, the
importance of decent aims.
John is still centre.
Thoughts(?)
Heroines are not important
Environment is
Flesh is
Relationships, people are(53)

Engel elaborated on these thoughts in a letter to Diarmuid Russell: “My researches into Canadian social history continue and are amusing … I have at last been rescued from a disastrous social situation by being able to state that Jack Fraser the bull breeder was my father's cousin. So I'm getting ready to re-write ‘Lost Heir’ and make it a Real book.”⁵⁴ In another letter to Russell, Engel wrote, “It is not yet obvious that the book fails to develop in an ordinary way on purpose” (emphasis added).

“Lost Heir” was another in a line of experimental efforts with which Engel attempted to move away from traditional novel form. Depending on neither plot nor suspense, it was a sort of mosaic in which characters and background were equally important. In Diarmuid Russell's opinion, part of its problem lay there and in the insufficient amount of detail that was required to sustain reader interest.⁵⁵ Despite the novel's vigour and originality, and the author's usual fine writing, “Lost Heir and Happy Families” never made its way into print.⁵⁶

Marian Engel's youthful publications and unpublished work point to a lively and creative literary imagination in the making and introduce several themes and motifs that were to be central to the author's later published works. Many of the early texts displayed impressive literary style and technique, as more than one publisher noticed. They also demonstrated Engel's daring in the realm of literary innovation. Finally, the early and unpublished work reveals her devotion to literature. Not only did she rewrite extensively and exhaustively, but she was exceedingly and consistently self-demanding and critical when it came to her own work. After rereading her work in December 1963, she jotted in a cahier: “Careless writing. Many clichés. What does it say?”⁵⁷ “How can I get rid of the crap,” she asked. “Comment. Question everything.”⁵⁸ Another notebook asks:

How to get the cheapness out.
A trashy form.
How trashy is the mind behind it?
If I say I have a cheap mind—what is cheap.
1) subject matter} melodramatic
2) conversation} stories
3) behaviour—sloppiness & neglect
4) dreaminess(59)

Marian Engel worked hard at her writing. As she said, she “put in all those years at the typewriter”⁶⁰ until she eliminated any “cheapness” and “sloppiness” she detected in her early work. Few critics ever faulted Engel's craft. Even those who did not care for her subject matter or her choice of vocabulary admitted that she wrote well. Imagination, talent, determination, and diligence were, however, not sufficient to produce work deemed worthy of publishing. Something was missing in the early and unpublished texts, for which no amount of flair or time at the typewriter could compensate. It was the element which, for Marian Engel, had to be combined with imagination in order for literary combustion to occur. This ingredient was life experience—more specifically, women's experience of life.

Writing out of her experience as a woman, about the experience of women, Engel wrote on her own terms. This had not so much been the case in her early and unpublished work. She came to describe these efforts as “much more Victorian and … worked out in terms which I didn't really believe in … the form is too much of a straightjacket.”⁶¹ Working in terms that she did believe in involved taking off the straightjackets of literary and social tradition alike. Victorian was no more her style than academic intrigue. Writing plays and detective novels were suggestions that had been made to Engel rather than being self-selected.⁶² She was now ready to write on her own terms.⁶³

Notes

1. Marian Engel Archive (MEA), box 6, file 17.

2. Matyas and Joiner, “Interview with Marian Engel” (hereafter, Matyas-Joiner interview).

3. For a complete listing, see Wengle, “Marian Engel (née Passmore): An Annotated Bibliography.”

4. Klein, “A Conversation with Marian Engel” (hereafter, Klein interview). Engel's later faiblesse in this regard is a measure of the distance she travelled in her search for identity, and in her interrogation of her upbringing. The shedding of a “United Church world view” was an important part of Engel's opus. Indeed, Bear could be regarded as the ultimate revolt against United Church Sunday School. Engel's friend and one time collaborator, Leslie Armour, speculated (in conversation, Ottawa, August 1990) that Engel's work would eventually have depicted the world view to which “escapees” of United Church Sunday School could ascribe. Armour saw The Glassy Sea as the first major stage in this direction.

5. Another story, “A Summer's Tale,” submitted the previous year, had won an honourable mention and been published in the July 1952 issue.

6. A letter from Hugh MacLennan suggests that Engel attempted painting, much as she tried different literary genres such as poetry and plays. None worked for her the way novels did. See MEA, box 1, file 8.

7. Having discovered that, by so doing, “you could take all the English courses the university offered without having to take Latin again” (Klein interview). Engel's training in French and German enabled her to become familiar with the literature of these countries. She continued to read their literature, especially French authors of the nouveau roman.

   In addition to her literary interests, Engel pursued other activities at university. She was vice-president of the Students' Council in her first year and a member of the Debating Club (winning the inter-year debating trophy in second year), and was vice-president of the Debating Union in her third year. She tried her hand at acting, with a role in the play The Heiress, staged at the university in the fall of 1954. She also joined the Philosophy Club and took part in the Writers' Workshop. Engel's many extracurricular activities did not interfere with her academic achievement. By the time she left McMaster, she had been awarded a number of scholarly distinctions, including an OHA scholarship, a Legion bursary, an MSB book prize, and an Isobel Walton Memorial Prize (Schuler, “Spotlight”; and “Four Receive Honour,” Silhouette, 11 February 1955, 2).

8. Engel was feature editor of the weekly Silhouette during her first year (September 1953 to March 1954) and associate editor during her second (September 1954 to March 1955). She became editorial assistant for the more literary Muse in the spring of 1953 and was editor from March 1954 until the following spring in 1955, when she graduated.

9. As in the case of the poem “Dawn in Mariposa,” which was published in the Muse in 1955:

   Convenor of the day's futility
   I rise to meet the dignitary dawn
   A little after six o'clock, and wan;
   The rising sun, the sky's celebrity
   Unboards the train, waves to me cheerily
   Sends autographs of light across the lawn,
   Then lingers 'til the engine smoke is gone.
   I watch this sun unpack and drowsily
   Think Phaeton's chariot is an old machine
   That halts and rumbles, coughing in the pale
   And yellow dawn; the sleeping world, withdrawn
   Sends out no brass bands and the day comes mean.
   Alone I greet the emissary; the stale
   Night recedes; I put the kettle on.

   Even in this early poem, literary loftiness is not without a link to concrete, everyday reality: “I put the kettle on.”

10. Published in the Silhouette, 20 November 1953.

11. Silhouette, 13 February 1953.

12. Muse, 1955.

13. Starting “Setting out from the shore I followed him.” See MEA, box 4, file 3.

14. On the same page as a story by Howard Engel, who also was a student at McMaster University and was likewise involved in the student newspapers. It is fascinating to compare these two early pieces by the future writers and married partners. Both take names, the emotion of feeling small, and married relations as their main themes. But the tale each tells is quite different. Howard Engel's “Story of Mr. Herbert Twilp” offers a glimpse of the future detective writer. The protagonist is “a small man” married to “a large domineering fat woman who always called him Herbert.” “Now ‘Herbert’ was his name,” the author writes, “but somehow Mr. Twilp never felt so small as when his wife called ‘Herbert.’” The otherwise insignificant Twilp one day shoots his wife and cuts her body up into little pieces, which he stores in the freezer and feeds one at a time to her cat Marge. The murder goes undetected. With time Twilp slips from sanity to death.

    “Mouse: A Sad Story” tells a different tale of feeling small and insignificant. As the title suggests, it is rather a sad story, its mousy protagonist seeing her artistic potential eclipsed by the flamboyant Max until it is completely blotted out by husband John. In the female case, being nondescript and insignificant does not play out in the same colourful but gruesome way as in the male case. Mr Twilp's fate is mad and dramatic and ends in death, but Mouse seems destined to a long and unfulfilled life of nonentity.

15. MEA, box 4, file 3.

16. MEA, box 4, file 2.

17. MEA, box 6, file 9.

18. MEA, box 1, file 8, Hugh MacLennan to Engel, 4 September 1957.

19. MEA, box 4, file 13.

20. MEA, box 26, file 12, “The Greening of Toronto: A Footnote to Mordecai Richler.”

21. Klein interview.

22. This feature of Engel's writing finds its visible representation in the comma, which proliferates in her writing, fulfilling a function that Leslie Armour considered (in interview, August 1990) a carry-over from medieval days. This was the comma signalling natural pauses in speech. According to Armour, Engel saw sentences in her head, including the spaces between the words. Into these spaces went commas. On the written page, these make up some of the most oddly placed punctuation that readers might encounter. They form a distinct Engel trademark, which may be traced to her early writing efforts and her attempts at plays. Armour added that Morley Callaghan used commas in a similar way, whereas Hugh MacLennan, to whom Engel was close at the time, did not.

23. MEA, box 4, file 5. The following quotations from play refer to this box and file.

24. MEA, box 4, file 4. The quotations from the play all refer to this box and file.

25. The piece is untitled and incomplete. It is found in MEA, box 4, file 3.

26. Engel, “Canadian Writing Today.”

27. Engel, “Why and How and Why Not and What Is This about Starting Another Novel …”

28. MEA, box 4, file 8.

29. Brady, Marian Engel and Her Works, 3.

30. Indeed, “The Pink Sphinx” might well make a good movie. The manuscript has the potential for an action-packed script.

31. In a letter dated 23 January 1957, he wrote: “This thesis of yours—correct me if I'm wrong—could presumably be expanded into a Ph.D. if you need one. Actually I would have thought it about good enough for a Ph.D. in English, for it certainly fulfilled the requirements so far as I can tell” (MEA, box 1, file 8).

32. Klein interview.

33. Leslie Armour elaborated on these recollections (in interview, Ottawa, August 1990). Himself a new appointee to the University of Montana, Armour was working on what would turn out to be his Irrational and the Real: An Essay in Metaphysics. His office was next to Engel's. Whenever he paused in his typing, he could hear “this great silence” as his neighbour sat “staring at her typewriter for hours and hours.” A solution seemed possible. Armour would provide Engel with a plot, and she would do the writing. “The idea was to keep it simple and lighthearted.” Beginning in November, they took turns writing, slipping the current version under each other's doors, The project unfolded fairly irregularly, interrupted at Christmas and during peak periods of academic duty. Amidst class preparations and term grading, however, a 213-page manuscript was produced.

34. Some of the characters stayed with Engel long afterwards. One turns up years later in Lunatic Villas: “Simeon's mother was a classmate of Tom's at UCLA who had run away with a visiting professor from Missoula, Montana, already possessed of a wife and six children. He did not know what to do with her or Sim, or with the six children. He committed suicide” (37).

35. Although she had hoped to finish “Women Travelling Alone” in England, Engel completed the work in Cyprus, where she and Howard relocated on 1 November 1962. On 31 March 1963 she mailed the manuscript to her agent Diarmuid Russell in New York. In the accompanying letter, she expressed her concern that the proposed title, “Women Travelling Alone,” might seem too “militant” and suggested as a possible alternative the evocative “Other People's Houses,” the “house theme” manifesting itself clearly here.

36. MEA, box 3, file 20, Engel to Diarmuid Russell, 1 October 1962.

37. Ibid.

38. Brady, Marian Engel and Her Works, 3; Gibson, Eleven Canadian Novelists (hereafter, Gibson interview), 106.

39. MEA, box 4, file 15.

40. MEA, box 3, file 20.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid. “Women Travelling Alone” was considered by Dial Press, Random House, Scribner's, Harper & Row, William Morrow, Atheneum, and McGraw-Hill.

45. MEA, box 3, file 20, Russell to Engel, 22 January 1964.

46. MEA, box 6, file 10.

47. On 16 March 1964, Russell wrote: “I read the mystery over the weekend—and am going to give you a rather confused report. (1) I can send this round as it stands for you write so nicely that I couldn't refuse to do this. But if I do I doubt it will be taken on account of (2) which is that the mystery element seems rather slighted—you know the dead cat and the dead dog are supposed to have something to do with the killings but as far as I can see get dropped” (MEA, box 3, file 20). The manuscript was sent around and seen by Scribner's, William Morrow, Doubleday, Norton, Lippincott, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Dodd Mead, and Walker & Company. In a letter dated 2 April 1965, Russell announced its “retirement” from the publishers' circuit.

48. MEA, box 3, file 20, Russell to Engel, 16 March 1964.

49. MEA, box 6, file 8.

50. MEA, box 6, file 10.

51. MEA, box 3, file 20.

52. Brady, Marian Engel and Her Works, 3.

53. MEA, box 6, file 15.

54. MEA, box 3, file 20, Engel to Russell, March 1972. The Engels lived at 503 Merton Street 1969-72.

55. MEA, box 3, file 20, Russell to Engel, 26 May 1972.

56. Engel showed “Lost Heir” to representatives of Harcourt Brace & World. On 17 March 1970, she received a letter from Dan Wickenden:

    In its way a good book, perhaps as good a book as Sarah Bastard, full of vigor, and of characteristic originality despite its rather more conventional framework. That framework is, beside being more conventional, more substantial as well: the book is more manifestly a novel than SB was, and I read it with a great deal of admiration. You write very well indeed, and your excellence is all your own. Nevertheless, for reasons hard to justify, we don't in the end find it really satisfying … For me the people are very much alive, and interesting too, but nobody seems to find any of them sufficiently sympathetic. Or it may just be that … there's an essential Canadianness that keeps your book from wholly engaging U.S. readers. I'm not suggesting that it is provincial; I think perhaps we are.

    (MEA, box 3, file 20)

    By mid-1972, Diarmuid Russell had seen “Lost Heir.” He wrote to Marian Engel on 26 May 1972:

    I think this book may be difficult for publishers. It has all your usual lively energetic and readable prose—but the way I look at it it's a mosaic in which characters and background are equally important and this creates some problems. If it were a regular mosaic the observer could take all in with a look and see the general pattern and then go to looking at details. As a literary form the reader can't see the pattern but is presented with details and probably can't be expected to see the general form till the end—but will they be sustained to read for a long time by details alone? I feel dubious. Can you wriggle your way out of this problem? All I can think of is some re-arrangement which maybe puts the end of the book first so that the pattern is clear. As it is not a work depending on plot and suspense there would be no harm in doing this. Brood over the matter and let me know.

    (MEA, box 3, file 20)

    Russell would not guide “Lost Heir” much further. A few months later, in November 1972, he underwent treatment for lung cancer. Not long afterwards, he announced his retirement. “I leave because I don't have energy to do all that has to be done,” he wrote Engel 16 March 1973. A few months later, she received a letter from Tim Seldes, Russell's successor. Diarmuid Russell had died on 16 December 1973.

57. MEA, box 6, file 8.

58. MEA, box 6, file 7.

59. MEA, box 6, file 8.

60. Engel, The Tattooed Woman, “Introduction,” xiv.

61. Gibson interview.

62. The suggestions having been made by Hugh McLennan and Howard Engel. The latter went on to establish himself as a detective novel writer.

63. Adele Wiseman once reflected upon her successful novel The Sacrifice as a book she had written almost by formula for her (male) professor Malcolm Ross. At times, it did not even seem like her book. Crackpot, on the other hand, felt entirely hers. Wiseman worked on this offbeat novel for many years, shaping it after a vision that was uniquely hers as a woman (Comments made during a classroom visit, Trent University, 1985).